I am in my co-worker Sam's backyard in Berkeley, California, admiring her garden roses, when she gently touches my arm and says, "You might want to think about moving. You're directly in the flight path." Flight path? I look up to the sky, puzzled—nothing. Then it hits me: Not 10 inches ahead of me is an unassuming wooden box softly humming with 30,000 bees (give or take). I am planted dead center in a honey bee superhighway; as if on cue, one of them plows into my shoulder, bounces off, and continues on its commute. I move over, fast.

Lately it appears I can't escape the bees. Not in a Wicker Man sort of way; it's more that everyone seems to be going a little bee-crazy. Since the discovery of Colony Collapse Disorder in 2006 — the mysterious honey bee affliction in which entire colonies abruptly vanish without a trace
and with no discernible trigger—the honey bee has become a cultural buzzword (no pun intended). The number of urban beekeepers, like Sam, has grown exponentially. Some say hobbyists were in part to blame for the swarms that infiltrated New York City this spring. You know a hobby has reached national status when Williams-Sonoma takes note; a few months ago the company started selling a beehive starter kit as part of its Agrarian Collection. High-end hotels, restaurants, and spas have joined in too. Resident beekeepers can now be found at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and at Calistoga Ranch, Napa Valley's plush spa retreat. At Berkeley's Chez Panisse, where I work as a writer and event planner for Alice Waters, two long, low-slung hives were quietly installed on the roof in 2011, and the first honey harvest came in a few months ago. The entire batch was used in one night of dinner service: a particularly delicious, if fleeting, honey ice cream.

Equally popular these days are honey's many by-products, all of which have tremendous therapeutic benefits. "Honey is nature's antiseptic," says Michael Sedlacek, a self-described "bee geek" who co-founded Minneapolis-based Worker B, a homegrown skincare line fashioned out of unprocessed bee-related ingredients. In fact, honey has featured prominently in folk medicine for millennia, and reams of clinical studies confirm its wound-healing effects. "Beeswax is an anti-inflammatory and a circulation-increaser, in addition to being a great moisturizer," Sedlacek says, which is why you see it in so many salves and lip balms. Propolis — the sticky substance derived from tree resin that bees use to coat the hive — has impressive antifungal and antibacterial effects on skin. And royal jelly, the rare and prized milky substance that nurse bees produce to feed to their queen, is purported to have tremendous immune-boosting, tissue-repairing properties. Small wonder, then, that many of the biggest and most venerable beauty companies — Guerlain, Greece's Apivita, and, of course, Burt's Bee — have built their philosophies around the tiny pollinator.

"Most of the planet — most of our food as we know it — wouldn't be here without the bees," Frédérique Keller, president of the American Apitherapy Society, tells me. Apitherapy involves the use of bee products in health care applications, like taking a propolis tincture to stave off a cold. Keller is also the most vocal expert in the emerging field of "apipuncture," the therapeutic practice of using live bee stings or venom injections at strategic acupuncture points. She uses apipuncture to treat "everything from joint pain and sports injuries to inflammation and scar reduction." Crazy? Perhaps. But the benefits are real, she claims. Yes, the venom causes an inflammatory response — but the key component of that venom is melittin, a potent protein that, according to some clinical studies, can slow the growth of cancerous tumors. Although it is possible to collect the venom without killing the bees, Keller thinks it more effective to treat patients with — yes — live bees, held delicately with tweezers and placed, thorax down, on the unlucky spot.

There are less painful ways to enjoy the salutary effects of bees — which brings us back to royal jelly, the cornerstone of two anti-aging creams released by Guerlain this month. The company claims that the concoctions — blends of wild honeys and ultraconcentrated royal jelly from France, exclusive to Guerlain — can repair tiny tears in skin tissue, boost collagen production, and stimulate fibers that provide structure to skin, for an overall lifting and firming effect.

But you can't avoid a certain amount of unpredictability when your prized skincare ingredients depend upon a creature that, however tiny, has an obduracy of its own. A bee goes where a bee wants to go, whether it's a biodynamically grown lavender blossom 20 yards from its hive or — as dismayed Brooklyn beekeepers found two years ago, when their charges began producing fluorescent red honey — the vats of high-fructose corn syrup at the local maraschino cherry factory. That means it's nearly impossible to control the trace levels of chemicals and pesticides in the bee products that go into your skincare. Guerlain addresses this problem by getting some of its honey from tiny, windswept Ouessant, an island at the western end of the English Channel where a species of black bee produces pollution-free ingredients. Guerlain uses the chemical analyses of Ouessant honey to create a baseline against which all its other bee products are measured.

One lingering concern: Is the demand for these powerhouse skincare ingredients overtaxing the very bees that have so enchanted us? "It's a ton of stress on the bees," says apiarist Rob Keller (no relation to Frédérique), of Napa Valley Bee Company. Keller, who tends hives for the French Laundry, Calistoga Ranch, and a host of other restaurants, has become a Lorax-like hero for bees and their defenders, advocating sustainable management practices and promoting the use of indigenous bees over mail-order colonies that often introduce diseases. (He's also the owner of the world's largest mobile bee observatory, which is housed in a vintage 1967 Airstream.) "I'm not that guy who's going to hustle bees for honey, or propolis, or royal jelly, and then throw them sugar water to keep them going," Keller says. "We should be actively working with the bees to get them strong."

Beauty companies are not insensible to this predicament. Guerlain has partnered with a foundation to preserve the habitat of the black bee of Ouessant. Apivita harvests less than 40 percent of what its bees produce and treats hives only with essential oils instead of chemicals or antibiotics. Burt's Bees has initiated a program to promote the growth of the wildflowers that bees feed on. Add those efforts to the work of newly minted backyard beekeepers and you have a good beginning, says Rob Keller. "We're getting there. People are really aware now," he says. More than anything, though, "it's just about loving your bees."